“The Civil War and Reconstruction,” a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian Eric Foner

in History, Online Courses | September 16th, 2014

It ended in early April 149 years ago. But it begins again on Wednesday. Columbia University’s “The Civil War and Reconstruction,” the latest salvo in the MOOC wars, opens Wednesday, September 17, for free to the world – a 27-week series of three courses on the nonprofit edX platform taught by Eric Foner, the university’s Pulitzer-Prize winning history professor and one of the world’s leading experts on 19^th-century America. You can enroll for free here.

“If you want to know where the world you’re living in today comes from,” Foner says in the series promotional trailer, “you need to know about the Civil War era.“ Headline issues of the moment – black-white race relations first among them, but also more general issues of equal justice under law, the power and proper role of government, and how lawmakers should deal with extremism, terror, and violence – all find roots in this conflict and its aftermath, a four-year war that saw approximately 700,000 Americans killed, and scores more injured, at the hands of their countrymen.

Foner’s general history books on the subject have sold thousands of copies – his new work on the underground railroad publishes in January – and he’s the author of the leading American history textbook taught in U.S. high schools. He’s crossed over from academe into mainstream media in other ways – with appearances on The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report, The Charlie Rose Show, Bill Moyers’s Journal, and more.

Columbia’s effort in free history education on screen dates back decades – as Foner makes clear in the promo video. Columbia’s history professors Richard Hofstadter and James Patrick Shenton reached thousands of people in their books and lectures, with Shenton even teaching a 76-part survey course on WNET Public Television called “The Rise of the American Nation” – which premiered in 1963! But many of the great lecturers from this university – literary critics and scholars Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, art historian Meyer Shapiro, and others – were never filmed systematically, and Foner, who will formally retire from teaching in a few years, was determined to ensure his courses were recorded, well-produced, and preserved for posterity – and available as educational resources to all.

The series, generously supported by Columbia’s provost, historian John Coatsworth, is produced by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), coincidentally celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. It’s the university’s first set of online courses on edX, after more than a dozen MOOCs on Coursera – and with more to come on both. The course promises some tantalizing new perspectives on the world then and now – as the two highlights reels show above.

Come & enlist – oops! — that is, enroll – today!

Peter B. Kaufman works at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning and is Executive Producer of Intelligent Television and YouTube’s Intelligent Channel.

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The Historic LSD Debate at MIT: Timothy Leary v. Professor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

in History, MIT | September 16th, 2014

On May 3, 1967, Dr. Timothy Leary, that high priest of hallucinogens, faced off in a debate with MIT professor Dr. Jerome Lettvin about LSD in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. Leary spent the debate in the lotus position, dressed in a white gown, beads and bare feet. The very picture of a counter culture icon. Lettvin, on the other hand, cuts a distinctly conservative figure, sporting a short-sleeved white shirt, a skinny tie and thick-framed glasses. On first blush, the debate might look like a stereotypical clash between the hip versus the square, but it ended up being much more interesting than that. Lettvin, who proved to be at least as charismatic as Leary, more than held his own against the man Richard Nixon once called “the most dangerous man in American.” You can watch the full debate above.

Leary speaks for the first half of the video. For those familiar with his routine, little of what you see will come as a surprise. He argues that LSD is a “a way of life and a sacrament and a sacrament is something that gets you high.” He goes on to cite groundbreaking figures like Einstein, Newton and William James who struggled to understand reality and consciousness. “The real goal of the scientist is to flip out,” he said to a packed auditorium filled with future scientists. “I don’t know if LSD is good or bad. It’s a gamble. It’s a risk. The sacrament is always a risk. … What isn’t? But LSD is the best gamble in the house.” Aiding him with his argument is a psychedelic picture show featuring a steady stream of images including ocean waves rolling backward, children bouncing on trampolines, and a man in a goatee eating soup, all set to a soundtrack by Ravi Shankar.

“Tim, your argument is exceedingly seductive,” Lettvin concedes at the beginning of his presentation (it begins around the 30:30 mark), which had none of the visual razzamatazz of Leary’s spiel. “I feel like this man is [in] the hands of the devil.”

Lettvin, however, proves not to be your standard anti-drug scold. At one point in the debate, he proclaims, “I can conceive of no more immoral thing than has been done by the government in the wholesale banning of drugs. … There’s a fundamentally monstrous thing about forbidding rather than reasoning people out.” And that’s exactly what Lettvin set out to do — reason the audience against taking acid. “The question is not scientific but moral,” he says. LSD has the potential to rob takers of their critical faculties, rendering them permanently spaced out. “The price seems a little steep to pay. You are settling for a permanent second rate world by the abnegation of the intellect.”

Lettvin’s performance is all the more impressive because he had little time to prepare. The faculty member who was originally slated to debate Leary bowed out at the last moment, and organizers scrambled to get someone, anyone, to face down the famed guru. Lettvin reportedly came straight from the lab to the auditorium and he even had to borrow a tie. Too bad Leary didn’t have a spare Nehru jacket.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Portraits of Vice Presidents with Octopuses on Their Heads — the Ones You’ve Always Wanted To See

in Art, History | September 12th, 2014

Last year, after parting ways with a punishing, thankless corporate job but before my wife gave birth to my first child, my friend invited me to participate in the From Dusk til Drawn fundraiser at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara. Basically, it involved drawing for 24 straight hours. At that point in my life – i.e. before children – sleep deprivation was a novelty. It sounded insane. I was in.

I knew I needed a system. The last thing I wanted was to be struggling for ideas of something to draw at four in the morning. So after some debate, I decided to draw portraits of all 47 vice presidents of the United States. With octopuses on their heads. Why?

It probably started with Walter Mondale. I was on the couch with my mother watching the returns for the 1984 election. When it became clear that he was not going to become America’s next chief executive, my mother, who spent her formative years in Berkeley during the thick of the ‘60s, stood up, proclaimed “Well, shit!” and stormed upstairs. I was in seventh grade. This was the first election I cared about. Mondale had reached for glory and failed spectacularly. Starting that night, I became fascinated with those who aspired to history but ended up a footnote. So obviously, I became interested in vice presidents.

The Constitution is surprisingly vague on the veep. Vice President Charles Dawes — a man who won a Nobel Peace Prize and who wrote a tune that would later become a pop hit, all before becoming Calvin Coolidge’s number two guy — summed up the job while talking with senator and future VP Alben W. Barkley like this: “I can do only two things here. One of them is to sit up here on this rostrum [in the Senate] and listen to you birds talk without the ability to reply. The other is to look at the newspapers every morning to see how the President’s health is.”

Though the position bestows on it all of the authority and pomp of the U.S. Government, vice presidents throughout history have struggled to find purpose in a poorly defined role, all the while waiting for death. It’s a bit like life itself. A few, through ambition, talent and a lot of luck, ascended to the top job. Most moldered in obscurity. No wonder then that John Nance Garner, one of FDR’s three VPs, called the job “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” I added the octopuses because I thought they were funny. It takes a rare person to pull off an air of dignity with a cephalopod on his head. It seems to fit with the absurdity of the job.

During From Dusk til Drawn, I was a machine. I cranked out 22 portraits of vice presidents in 24 hours. That’s one an hour, excluding a 2am jaunt to get a rice bowl and a handful of bathroom breaks. Over the next year, I drew and redrew them all from John Adams to Joe Biden and then, starting this past July, I began posting one picture a day on my site Veeptopus. I’m up to Hubert H. Humphrey now. During this time, I learned a lot about formerly important people who are now almost entirely unknown. People like William R. King, who died of tuberculosis three weeks after getting sworn in as VP, or John Breckinridge, who fled to Cuba to avoid getting arrested for treason. You can see the fruits of my crazy scheme here. I hope you enjoy.

Above, in descending order, you can find portraits of 1) Garret Hobart (1897–1899), the 24th Veep under William McKinley; 2) Thomas Jefferson, who bucked the VP trend and made something of himself; and 3) George Clinton who served under Jefferson and Madison. Don’t confuse him with the guy from Parliament Funkadelic.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And you can check out his online Veeptopus store here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Art of Swimming, 1587: A Manual with Woodcut Illustrations

in Art, History, Sports | September 5th, 2014

As the late great Robert Shaw remarked in Jaws, “here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.”

Or failing that, an extremely bow-legged man, as featured in Sir Everard Digby’s 1587 treatise-cum-manual, De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming). Hubba hubba, who needs trunks?

There were no pools at the time. The male bathers populating Digby’s 40 plus woodcut illustrations are river swimmers, like Ben Franklin, the inventor of swim fins and the only Founding Father to be inducted (posthumously) into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

As Franklin would two centuries later, Digby sought to bring both water safety and proper form to the masses. According to the BBC’s History Magazine, the Cambridge Don’s goal was “to turn swimming from a disregarded skill of bargees and boatmen into an accomplishment for gentlemen, to make them more like the Romans.”

To get closer to his goal, Digby breaks it down as deftly as an online swim instructor in the era of youtube. When not delivering the how to’s on back stroke, side stroke, and doggy paddle, he’s advising absolute beginners on how to enter the water and steer clear of animal-befouled holes, and helping more seasoned students embellish their game with nifty tricks, (dancing, toenail cutting).

Prolong the lazy days of summer by browsing through more images from De Arte Natandi at the Public Domain Review. Or see the text itself here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, and extremely enthusiastic swimmer. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Yale Launches an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

in Archives, History, Photography | September 4th, 2014

During the Great Depression, The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) hired photographers to travel across America to document the poverty that gripped the nation, hoping to build support for New Deal programs being championed by F.D.R.‘s administration.

Legendary photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein took part in what amounted to the largest photography project ever sponsored by the federal government. All told, 170,000 photographs were taken, then catalogued back in Washington DC. The Library of Congress became their eventual resting place.

We first mentioned this historic project back in 2012, when the New York Public Library put a relatively small sampling of these images online. But today we have bigger news.

Yale University has launched Photogrammar, a sophisticated web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing these 170,000 historic photographs.

The Photogrammar platform gives you the ability to search through the images by photographer. Do a search for Dorothea Lange’s photographs, and you get over 3200 images, including the now iconic photograph at the bottom of this post.

Photogrammar also offers a handy interactive map that lets you gather geographical information about 90,000 photographs in the collection.

And then there’s a section called Photogrammar Labs where innovative visualization techniques and data experiments will gradually shed new light on the image archive.

According to Yale, the Photogrammar project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Directed by Laura Wexler, the project was undertaken by Yale’’s Public Humanities Program and its Photographic Memory Workshop. You can learn more about the genesis of the project and its technical challenges here.

Top image: A migrant agricultural worker in Marysville migrant camp, trying to figure out his year’s earnings. Taken in California in 1935 by Dorothea Lange.

Second image: Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of cotton sharecropper. Photo taken in Hale County, Alabama in 1935 by Walker Evans.

Third image: Wife and children of sharecropper in Washington County, Arkansas. By Arthur Rothstein. 1935.

Fourth image: Wife of Negro sharecropper, Lee County, Mississippi. Again taken by Arthur Rothstein in 1935.

Bottom image: Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Taken by Dorothea Lange in Nipomo, California, 1936.

h/t @pbkauf

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Foodie Alert: New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restaurant Menus (1851–2008)

in Archives, Design, Food & Drink, History | September 4th, 2014

To be a New Yorker is to be a gourmand—of food carts, local diners, supermarkets, outer borough mercados, whatever latest upscale restaurant surfaces in a given season.… It is to be as likely to have a menu in hand as a newspaper, er… smartphone…, and it is to notice the design of said menus. Well, some of us have done that. Often the added attention goes unrewarded, but then sometimes it does. Now you, dear reader, can experience well over one-hundred years of staring at menus, thanks to the New York Public Library’s enormous digitized collection. Fancy a time warp through dining halls abroad? You’ll not only find several hundred New York restaurants represented here, but hundreds more from all over the world. With a collection of 17,000 menus and counting, a person could easily get lost.

You may notice I used the word “gourmand,” and not “foodie” above. While it might be a gross anachronism to call someone a “foodie” in 1859, the year the menu for the Metropolitan Hotel (above) was printed, it might also import a cosmopolitan concept of dining that didn’t seem to exist, at least at this establishment. More than anything, the menu resembles the various descriptions of pub food that populate Joyce’s Ulysses. Though much of it was delicious, I’m sure, for heavy eaters of meat, eggs, potatoes, and bread, you won’t find a vegetable so much as mentioned in passing. The fare does include such hearty staples as “Hashed Fish,” “Stale Bread,” and “Breakfast Wine.” The design marries flowery Victorian elements with the kind of font found in Old West typesets.

1939 was a good year for menus, at least in Europe. While New York institutions like the Waldorf Astoria practiced certain design austerities, the Maison Prunier, with locations in Paris and London, spared no expense in the printing of their full-color fishermans’ slice of life painting on the menu cover above and the elegant typography of its extensive contents below. A version was printed in English—though The New York Public Library (NYPL) doesn’t seem to have a copy of it digitized. One English phrase stands out at the bottom, however: the translation of “Tout Ce Qui Vient De La Mer–Everything From the Sea.” Other menus for this restaurant show the same kind of careful attention to design. Clicking on the pages of many of the NYPL menus—like this one from a 1938 Maison Prunier menu—brings up an interactive feature that links each dish to close-up views.

In a post on the NYPL menu collection, Buzzfeed specifically compares New York menus of today with those of 100 years ago, noting that prices quoted signify cents, not dollars. A 1914 Delmonico “Rib of Roast” would run you .75 cents, for example, while a 2014 rib eye there sells for 58 big ones. Of course then, as now, many restaurants considered it gauche to print prices at all. See, for example, the dinner menu at New Orleans’ St. Charles Hotel from 1908 below. We may have an all-inclusive feast here since this comes from a New Years Eve bill, which also includes a “Musical Program” in two parts and a list of local “Amusements” at such places as Blaney’s Lyric Theatre, Tulane, Dauphine, “French Orera” (sic), and the 2:00 pm races at City Park. Matinees and 8 o’clock shows every day except Sunday.

The sixties gave us an explosion of menus that parallel in many cases the breakout designs of magazine and album covers. See two standouts below. The North German Lloyd, just below, went with a funky children’s book-cover illustration for its 1969 menu cover, though its interior maintains a minimalist clarity. Below it, see the striking first page of a menu for Johnny Garneau’s Golden Spike from that same year. The cover boasts a nostalgic headline story for Promontory News: “Golden Spike is Driven: The last rail is laid! East meets West in Utah!” Put it on the cover of a Band or CSNY album and no one bats an eye.

See many, many, many more menus at the NYPL site. With the steady growth of food scholarship, this collection is certainly a boon to researchers, as well as curious gourmands, foodies, and rabid diners of all stripes.

via Buzzfeed

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

in Books, History | September 1st, 2014

Leiden University book historian Erik Kwakkel describes his tumblr site as follows: “I post images from medieval books.” In the words of Samuel L. Jackson on the immortal Snakes on a Plane, you either want to see that, or you don’t. Presuming you do (and given your presumable status as an Open Culture reader, it strikes me as a safe bet) know that Kwakkel doesn’t maintain just any old images of medieval books; his posts tend to highlight the askew, the obscure, and the innovative, further demonstrating that we need not find the “dark ages” dull. At the top of the post, you can see one photo of the several he posted of the biggest books in the world, in this case the “famous Klencke Atlas” from the 16th century. “While they are rare, such large specimens,” writes Kwakkel, “they do represent a tradition. Choir books, for example, needed to be big because they were used by a half circle of singers gathered around it in a church setting. If you are impressed with the size of these objects, just imagine turning their pages!”

Above, we have an example of what Kwakkel calls “Siamese twins,” two books bound as one using an odd binding “called ‘dos-à-dos’ (back to back), a type almost exclusively produced in the 16th and 17th centuries.” You could read one text one way, then turn the thing over and read a whole other text the other way. “You will often find two complementary devotional works in them, such as a prayerbook and a Psalter, or the Bible’s Old and New Testament. Reading the one text you can flip the ‘book’ to consult the other” — no doubt a handy item, given the religious priorities of the average reader in the Europe of that era. The animated image below highlights a related and equally unusual binding effort, a dos-à-dos from the late 16th century containing “not two but six books, all neatly hidden inside a single binding (see this motionless pic to admire it). They are all devotional texts printed in Germany during the 1550s and 1570s (including Martin Luther, Der kleine Catechismus) and each one is closed with its own tiny clasp.”

If this kind of highly vintage, labor-intensive bookmaking gets your blood flowing, make sure to see see also Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, the 700-page 17th-century guide to colors we featured in July, and which Kwakkel covered on his blog back in April: “Because the manual is written by hand and therefore literally one of a kind, it did not get the ‘reach’ among painters — or attention among modern art historians — it deserves.” Just one more reason to appreciate the internet, even if, as a medium, you far prefer the medieval book.

Keep tabs on Kwakkel’s tumblr site for more unusual finds, and don’t miss his other blog, Medieval Fragments, where he and other scholars delve more deeply into the wonderful world of medieval books.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Five Best North Korean Movies: Watch Them Free Online

in Film, History | August 27th, 2014

According to official propaganda, Kim Jong-Il was a remarkably impressive individual. He learned to walk when he was just three weeks old; he wrote 1,500 books while at university; and, during his first and only game of golf, he scored 11 holes in one. Yet for some reason becoming the world’s first North Korean professional golf player didn’t seem to interest Kim. He wanted to make movies. So, in 1978, while his father Kim Il-Sung was still the country’s supreme leader, Kim set out to modernize the film industry of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“The North’s filmmakers are just doing perfunctory work,” Kim said to South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok. “They don’t have any new ideas…their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.”

Of course, Kim’s bold plan to jumpstart the industry was to kidnap Shin and his wife, both celebrities in South Korea. He was abducted in Hong Kong and, when he had the temerity to try to escape, he ended up spending four years toiling in prison, subsisting on little more than grass and a little rice. Eventually, Shin was approached by Kim and given an offer he dare not refuse: make movies in North Korea.

Like the films cranked out in China during the height of the Cultural Revolution, North Korean movies are largely propaganda delivery systems designed exclusively for a domestic audience. After Shin’s kidnapping, DPRK movies started to get just a bit less didactic. Simon Fowler, who writes probably the only English-language blog on North Korean cinema, just wrote an article for The Guardian where he selected the best films to come out of the Hermit kingdom. You can watch a few of these movies here and find the others at The Guardian. They might be goofy, maudlin and ham-fisted, but for movie mavens and aficionados of Communist kitsch, they are fascinating.

Perhaps the most important North Korean movie ever is The Flower Girl (1972). Watch it above. Set during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea, the film follows a young woman who endures one injustice after another at the hands of the Japanese before Kim Il-Sung’s army marches into her village and saves the day. The movie set the template for many of the movies to come afterwards. As Fowler writes, “the importance of The Flower Girl within the DPRK cannot be overestimated. The star, Hong Yong-hee, adorns the one won bank note in North Korea, and is revered as a national hero. Although not always an easy watch, those wanting to learn more about the average North Koreans’ sensibilities could do far worse than to watch this picturesque but tragic film.”

Hong Kil Dong (1986) is clearly one of the movies Shin Sang-ok influenced; it foregrounded entertainment over ideology, a rarity at that point in the country’s film history. The movie is about a character from Korean literature who, like Robin Hood, not only robs from the rich and gives to the poor but knows how to deliver a beatdown. Hong plays out like a particularly low-budget Shaw Brothers kung fu spectacle with plenty of flying kicks, sword play and wire work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCKSR0JArUQ#t=5000

And finally, there’s Pulgasari (1985), North Korea’s attempt at making a kaiju movie. Set in feudal times, the film is about a statue that comes to life, grows to monstrous proportions and, unable to sate its unquenchable thirst for metal, starts to smash things. Shin managed to get technical help for the movie from Toho, the same Japanese studio that cranked all those Godzilla movies. In fact, they even got veteran kaiju actor, Kenpachiro Satsuma, to don a rubber suit for this movie. Years later, Pulgasari was released in Japan about the same time as Roland Emmerich’s god awful Hollywood remake of Godzilla (not to be confused with Gareth Edward’s god awful Hollywood remake from earlier this year). Satsuma publically stated what a lot of Japanese privately thought – Pulgasari is better than Emmerich’s big-budget dud.

Not long after Shin completed Pulgasari, he and his wife managed to escape in Vienna thanks to the help of the CIA and a host of other unlikely parties. Kim Jong-Il might have had super human abilities, but talent retention did not seem to be one of them.

You can watch the three films listed above, plus Marathon Runner and Centre Forward over at The Guardian.

More free films can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via Coudal

North Korea’s Cinema of Dreams

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

“The Civil War and Reconstruction,” a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian Eric Foner

The Historic LSD Debate at MIT: Timothy Leary v. Professor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

Portraits of Vice Presidents with Octopuses on Their Heads — the Ones You’ve Always Wanted To See

The Art of Swimming, 1587: A Manual with Woodcut Illustrations

Yale Launches an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

Foodie Alert: New York Public Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restaurant Menus (1851–2008)

Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

The Five Best North Korean Movies: Watch Them Free Online

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